News Roundup: Challenge Mode reward updates, April Fools roundup

Challenge Mode Reward Updates

Blizzard has just posted a blog which details changes to the Challenge Mode rewards issued when the current "season" ends.

Some rewards are getting big changes, notably the Silver reward mounts from Ancestral Phoenix Egg are now account-wide plus you automatically know all four color variations instead of having to pick one color. In addition, the nine titles for Realm Best times are being completely removed.

Watcher later posted clarifications on why the Realm Best titles are being permanently removed, which we've added to our blog.

Blizzard

* Reward ClarificationsWith the upcoming end of the Challenge Mode Season, we wanted to provide some additional clarification on how we plan to handle rewards.Achievements: All Achievements associated with Mists of Pandaria Challenge Modes will become Feats of Strength.Rewards

Bronze: The “Undaunted” title for achieving a full set of Bronze medals will become account-wide.

Silver: The Pandaren Phoenix mounts awarded for a full set of Silver medals will become account-wide. If any character on an account has earned a full set of Silver medals, all four variants of the Pandaren Phoenix (Crimson, Ashen, Violet, and Emerald) will become available to all characters account-wide.

Gold: The cosmetic class sets will remain character-specific. Any character that has earned all nine Gold medals will still be able to repurchase the appropriate set, should they misplace theirs, from Challenger Soong or Challenger Wuli in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms. Any characters that have earned one or more “Challenger’s Path” teleport spells by earning Gold medals in Mists Challenge Modes will retain those spells.

Realm Best Titles: There are extremely limited titles that are held by the players who hold the best clear time for a given dungeon on a given server. Since those Challenge dungeons will no longer be available in Warlords of Draenor, their respective titles are also being permanently removed. There will be new Challenge dungeons in the upcoming Warlords season, and new titles for which to contend, however.

Thanks for all the feedback, and I understand that while much of the news was positive, most of the people who have worked tremendously hard for the realm-best titles are justifiably upset that they will not be permanent.

The realm-best titles were added with little fanfare in Patch 5.4. It's possible that they were a flawed idea in their conception, but the hope was to foster a bit of competition within individual servers, and to encourage people who had long since finished up their Gold medal collection to revisit the dungeons and try to dethrone the current champs. The titles were by nature transitory, where any day you might log in and discover that someone had beaten your time, and that you'd lost the title. We added Feats of Strength, which were permanent, to recognize and commemorate the fact that you held the title for a time. These Feats of Strength remain among the rarest in the game.

If we'd wanted to add a fixed Platinum Medal tier with additional rewards, we could have done that, but the point was to encourage friendly competition against people you see standing around town on a regular basis. We're also aware that while essentially any class composition can get all Golds, balance breaks down at the extreme high end of the spectrum, and we wouldn't want to set a formal benchmark that some groups couldn't reach even with expert play.

Looking ahead to Warlords, we were left with the open question of how to handle the realm-best titles once the current set of Challenge Modes ceased to be available. By default, if we kept the titles as-is, the final players who held them on the day the servers went down for patch 6.0 maintenance would have kept them. Unless they ever transferred servers. Or unless their realm got connected with another realm with faster record times. This is because by definition, the titles are tied to a specific realm, and were always meant to be. Keeping the titles around with that level of inconsistency and uncertainty was not an acceptable outcome in our eyes.

We considered an alternate option of letting all players who have the Feat of Strength for ever holding a best time, however briefly, permanently keep the title associated with that dungeon. The major downside there, as I noted on Twitter, would be the precedent it would have set going into the next Challenge Mode season. Should the first group on a server to get a Gold Medal in the Shadowmoon Burial Grounds (one of our upcoming dungeons), the first week of the expansion, earn a permanent title, while another group a few weeks later that clears the dungeon four minutes faster (but not a new record at the time) does not get that same reward because they waited too long to stake their claim? We also do not want to encourage groups to seek out less competitive servers just to grab best times and thus permanent titles.

The groups that set records this time around will surely be top contenders in the Challenge Mode season, and you do have a unique Feat of Strength to record your accomplishment in Mists. That said, we clearly should have settled these questions sooner, so as to better set expectations.

Lead Encounter Designer Ion "Watcher" Hazzikostas has also tweeted some clarifications:

Comments

Comment by chrth

Is it wrong that I squeed when I saw that the Pandaren Phoenix was becoming account-wide and all 4 available?

Comment by Aksannyi

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 13:39:29 -0500

Those patch notes had me - I was trying so hard not to crack up at work while reading those. So glad to see Blizzard continue to keep their sense of humor.

Comment by xilibrius

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 14:37:59 -0500

Elvui changed your set-up to make it hello kitty themed with dancing hello kitty and japanese theme song playing.

Comment by oliviadgrace

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:05:17 -0500

Definitely not! I'm so happy I don't have to grind out the 4k gold for Artisan Riding -- the characters I have 9/9 on don't have it so can't learn the mount!

Comment by Zarkoria

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:16:37 -0500

"Ancestral Phoenix Egg are now account-wide plus you automatically know all four color variations instead of having to pick one color."

So.. if i get one egg, i get all 4 mounts?

Comment by Hanterx

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 15:38:51 -0500

"All Achievements associated with Mists of Pandaria Challenge Modes will become Feats of Strength" I Think this will mean that Each and everyone of the CM will give you an Feats of Strength, but if you have 9/9 in Bronze/Silver/Gold you will only see 3 of all your FoS in the Achivment-list ingame, like the achivments from Wotlk.

Comment by ahunter8056

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 16:06:58 -0500

As much as I loved Blizzard's April Fools jokes, Warcraft Mounts has now become my favourite by far for how much they used Doctor Who as their April Fool. I would like to thank them for having such amazing taste.

Comment by Dondocool

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 20:26:47 -0500

I loved Tumblr's April Fool's Joke, with Tumblr Pro, it just basically put little top hats on all of the user pictures, and they thought that we were gonna get annoyed, but we wanted to keep them.

Comment by Crystalfire

on Wed, 02 Apr 2014 23:30:58 -0500

I was really bummed to find out that there was no paper mâché cat. I'm a huge Walking Dead fan. And I really thought the whole idea of season themed treasure hunting would be killer! Maybe u guys should take some of these great ideas to them. I think a lot of people these days would really enjoy seeing some of them end up in game! Gratz to all u guys who worked on that! It was awesome!

Comment by filchoklad

on Thu, 03 Apr 2014 03:54:07 -0500

Haha loved it, happened in raid after relog for me, and first I was just like WTF? 10 seconds later "I love this" :3

Comment by avnliquid

on Thu, 03 Apr 2014 06:09:15 -0500

i think it means no matter whioch of the 4 you choose , that color mount will be account wide

Comment by TutorialBlox

on Thu, 03 Apr 2014 13:12:59 -0500

So can someone please help me understand this...

One character with all silver = All four phoenix mounts?

So let's say I have 146 mounts and I get this, would that be 150 mounts and would I get a my kite?

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